Audio Visual Insights for Web-Conferencing and Live Streaming

Anyone who has tried to keep in contact while saving money has needless to say watched, as conferencing solutions have gone from something that kinda-sorta-maybe could be considered a video call to high-quality, interactive discussions.

From the early telephonoscope concept in 1879, which transmitted “light,” or images, accompanied by sound, to Germany’s first commercially available “videotelephony” in the late 1930s, people recognized the value in accompanying audio with images or video.

By the 1970’s, AT&T’s Picturephone technology had pushed the market as far as it could go, evolving from a series of static images generated every few seconds to a “smooth” video stream. Yet further progress seemed stalled as a result of the pipelines—preexisting telephone lines, which could only carry limited amounts of data.

Not only was it limited, but the extreme costs of owning and maintaining such equipment were ghastly, particularly to the budget conscious businesses of the time. As a result, the technology would remain out of reach for most businesses over the next few years.

H.323/SIP & Web Conferencing

Video conferencing has come so far in the past few years. If you follow the industry you know web conferencing software provides like: BlueJeans, Spontania, Vidyo and Zoom.US are providing "H.323 & SIP" integration with their cloud based services. In essence, this is connecting the traditional video conferencing systems from Polycom and Cisco to the cloud without the need to purchase expensive hardware. Without going into too much detail H.323 was the original standard protocol and SIP is the new and improved protocol (more info here).

What's easier than conducting a important meeting right from your home office? If you are hosting, joining or conducting webinars and online meetings from your home office, check out our "7 Tips for joining Online Meetings from your home office".

What's the difference?

Hosting your own meetings requires a server, bandwidth and a little bit of IT knowledge. Hiring a 3rd party like GoToMeeting or WebEX can rack up huge bills over a couple years, but they are less expensive upfront. The reason why "Host your Own" is turning so many heads in the industry is:

What's more natural than launching a video call in a Microsoft Lync and Office 365 environment? Microsoft has built in high quality video conferencing to it's most core product line: Microsoft Office. Now that MS Office 365 has moved to the cloud, the natural pairing of MS Lync is a great way to integrate your workflow. Microsoft has considered what matters most: ease of use. By integrating online meetings with unified communications, presence and chat, meeting face-to-face with your team is just a click a way.